It’s 1 pm. Do you know where your excerpt is?

Not having my work done when I say I will causes me massive anxiety. Some people have losing-their-teeth dreams, others have standing-before-class-naked nightmares; I wake up in a cold sweat with a deep, visceral dread of having missed an important deadline. So when it actually happens, oof.

Today I was supposed to post a new excerpt and it’s not ready. Let the self-flagellation begin.

Here’s what I told myself when I started this project, though: Dead SULs is a real, live, real-life experiment. That means I’ll make mistakes. Or, as a recent article from The Guardian reminded me, maybe they’re not mistakes:

If artists more frequently approached writing in public as just such an extension [of their work], rather than a means of explaining or promoting it, they might find the process comes more naturally. I’m calling for a messier kind of writing, more vulnerable and yet more declamatory. Writing that is the product of a desire to speak as well as an obligation to communicate. A more restless kind of writing, devoid of neatness, riddled with ambiguities and rhetorical flourishes.

Part of the reason I’m late with today’s excerpt is that my brain’s been all buzzy with ideas from Book^2 Camp, an “unconference” event I went to last week in New York. A bunch of us geeked out talking about the future of storytelling – how ebooks change the experience of reading (and writing), blog-to-book deals, whither the publishing industry etc. And as a result, I realized that I need to find tools to present Dead SULs in a more immersive and interactive way.

So I’m pushing back the excerpt release dates by a week. Same time and channel, with new batty thoughts. Hopefully I’ll have found and integrated some of those new tools to expand my storytelling kit. And I’m also going to blog a bit more in the meantime, because I think it’ll help to externalize the ideas I got so excited about at Book Squared. Also the noise level from all the chatter in my head is getting intolerable.

In the meantime may we all have fewer toothless, nude, truancy-themed dreams, except the ones that we can turn into six-figure blockbuster screenplays.

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Will I like this book? That depends. Are you:
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If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, you will probably* like Dead SULs.
*not guaranteed